User:Roger A. Lohmann/sandbox

"When there isn't anything else fun to do, I go outside and play in my sandbox."

Anon. (Age 8)

Opinion Leaders

(These two sections are being written for addition to the Public article I've been working on.)

An important contribution to the process of public opinion formation was the Lazarsfeld-Katz "two-step flow of communication" model and the related concept of opinion leaders. Opinion leaders, in this model, are the most active and best informed media consumers, who come to be respected for their expertise by others in their daily lives, and consequently through processes of social influence have an extraordinary influence on public opinion, represented not only by their own opinions but also those who they have influenced. Opinion leadership tends to be subject-specific, with physicians having an inordinate influence on issues of medicine and health, engineers on technical questions, clergy on religious matters and so on. The concept of champions has sometimes been used to translate the behavioral insights of the two-step flow model into the context of opinion formation as part of the policy process in organizations.

Dewey and Lippman on Publics

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a working journalist and political commentator whose theorizing exercised a powerful influence on twentieth century views of the public. Along with Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, Lippman was one of the founding editors of The New Republic and a highly influential force in American journalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Among other notable contributions, he popularized use of the term "stereotype" which in his definition referred to "the pictures in our heads". In addition to his role as a journalist, Lippman was an a WASP elitist who also served as an informal advisor to a number of U.S. presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Lyndon Johnson.

In Public Opinion (1922) Lippmann offered his fullest statement of a strongly elitist view of representative democracy, the #general public and a passive, information-processing view of public opinion formation. Lippmann argued that modern industrial democracies was too complex for average citizens to effectively understand and direct. Government must be largely carried out by an expert-based governing class. He saw the accuracy of news and the protection of journalistic sources as the principal problem of democracy and presented the public largely in Platonic terms as a bewildered and rather passive herd. In modern, industrial society, according to Lippmann, it was the job of the journalist to translate the actions and motives of the "governing class" of bureaucratic experts and specialists into terms that the general public could comprehend. He found the notion of actual government by the people (as opposed to their better-informed representatives) altogether implausible. Three years later, in The Phantom Public (1925), his view reached what proved to be for him its outer limit when Lippmann recognized that members of the governing class of experts could themselves be outsiders to any particular problem. Apart from the few who understood any particular issue, even other experts were not possessed of sufficient accurate information to be capable of effective action. (Lippmann may have been influenced in this view, some authorities believe, by the views of European Facists who were already in power in Italy and gaining strength elsewhere in Europe at the time or by advocates of technocracy.) Lippmann’s view is that public affairs are largely the responsibility of elected representatives and appointed officials who are expert elites. Many other progressives expressed similar views, including Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly and Mary Parker Follett's early (1896) study of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Two years later, in The Public and its Problems, John Dewey, perhaps the best-known American philosopher and public intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, offered a response to Lippmann’s defense of representative democracy. In contrast to Lippman's expert model of representative democracy, Dewey argued that politics is the responsibility of all citizens, and that adequate education would provide citizens with the knowledge needed to be involved in politics. In the Dewey model, there was a place for ordinary citizens along side elites, and experts in government, and journalism assumed an educational role. Dewey also worked out the implications of expertise for the public as well as leaders: In reply to Lippman's implied (and debilitating) division of labor among experts, he posited multiple publics with specialized and focused interests paralleling those of the experts. Decades later, the political researcher and theorist Robert Dahl in a study of New Haven politics detailed similar public dynamics between experts, elites and interested publics and numerous other political studies have detailed focused publics as "constituencies" of public bureaucracies. At the same time David Easton and other political systems theorists theorized feedback loop ( notably "#public opinion") back to the experts and leaders, and Lazarsfeld and Katz identified a "two-step flow" of communication in which #public opinion formation was mediated by an even more complex division of labor involving not only experts and publics but also "opinion leaders" whose greater expertise and knowledge is recognized by other members of the public who take their cues

The following paragraphs were taken directly from Wikipedia and need to be corrected and rewritten):

Dewey also revisioned journalism to fit this model by taking the focus from actions or happenings and changing the structure to focus on choices, consequences, and conditions, in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge in the community. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told of what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the community added value by generating knowledge. The audience would disappear, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it.

Dewey’s journalism was revolutionary because it changed the structure from choosing a winner of a given situation to posing alternatives and exploring consequences. His effort to change journalism, involve citizens, stimulation, was all under the auspices of creating the Great Community he wrote of in The Public and its Problems: “Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community” (Dewey, pg. 144).

Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who actively participate in public life contribute to that community. "The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy." (The Public and its Problems, p. 149). This Great Community can only occur with "free and full intercommunication." (p. 211) Communication can be understood as journalism - the traditional forum in which people communicate.

Article Ideas, Fragments, etc

• Musical theater [r]: Add brief definition or description

Title	Composer/Librettist	Location	Main Characters	Date First Produced	Date Movie
Oklahoma	Oscar Hammerstein/Richard Rodgers	Oklahoma Territory	Curley McLain, Laurey Williams	1941	1943
State Fair		Iowa State Fair	1948	1948	1948
Annie Get Your Gun			Annie Oakley	1900	1900
Meet Me In St. Louis				1900	1900
South Pacific		WWII in Pacific		1900	1900
Wonderful Town		NYC		1900	1900
New York, New York				1900	1900
Phantom of the Opera	Andrew Lloyd Webber	Paris Opera, Paris Sewer		1941	1943
Aspects of Love	Andrew Lloyd Webber		1948	1948	1948
Cats	Andrew Lloyd Webber		1900	1900
Evita	Andrew Lloyd Webber	Argentina			1900
West Side Story	Leonard Bernstein			1900	1900
The Sound of Music		Austria		1900	1900
My Fair Lady		Edwardian London		1900	}
Private Lives	Noel Coward			1900	}
Kiss Me Kate				1900	}
The King and I		Siam		1900	}
Pal Joey				1900	}
Guys and Dolls		Broadway		1900	}
London Calling	Noel Coward	London	Willy & George Craft	1923	}

• Grand opera [r]: Add brief definition or description
• Operetta [r]: Add brief definition or description
• Alan Furst [r]: Add brief definition or description

References

(No workgroup is going to want to claim this!)